


with benediction in her eyes

by orphan_account



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Stream (Critical Role), Religion, The Raven Queen - Freeform, Torture, the Briarwoods - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-20 16:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21284522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Deep beneath Whitestone, in Dr. Ripley’s lab, Percy finds religion.
Relationships: Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III & Anna Ripley
Comments: 3
Kudos: 49





	with benediction in her eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: semi-graphic torture, incoherent rambling about D&D religion

Whitestone Castle, the Temple of Pelor, 793 PD, around two in the afternoon: the priest leans forwards, hands heavy on her knees, and asks, “What do you believe, Percival?” 

Percy doesn’t answer, because Percy doesn’t want to answer. And because Percy is a de Rolo, he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to be here, and so he shouldn’t have to be - except Vesper told Mother that he’s been sleeping during prayers, and he didn’t deny it (why should he? It’s _ true _ ), and Mother’s been getting more and more devout, more and more worry-eyed, since Ludwig’s illness, and he’s going to pinch Vesper so hard she won’t even _ look _ at him for the next _ month_, let alone tattle on him to their parents (she’s such a _ child_). And so Percival remains silent. 

The priest is silent, too. Other people might find comfort, even joy, in this shared stillness, but it makes Percy want to wriggle in his seat. He is a de Rolo, so he doesn’t, but he thinks about it very hard. The priest has a heavy gaze, weighted not with judgement but with knowledge, with understanding. It’s one of the reasons why Percy never looks at her, why during her sermons he stares at his feet or out the window; he is young, but already he disdains the attempts of outsiders to _ know _him. 

In the courtyard, his sibling’s laughter is pitched high and bright. Vesper is going to regret this, he promises himself. 

Two minutes pass. Twenty. The bells for afternoon prayers surely must want ringing, but the priest’s level, sunlit eyes never leave his face. Percy wishes for a cloud to give him even a moment’s reprieve. 

Chanting in the chapel: _ as we raise our voices to the Dawnfather, we ask that his rays illuminate our lives; as we seek out the mercy of the Shining One, we beg his mercy light our path towards salvation. _

Percy’s lips curl. “I don’t believe in this,” he hears himself say.

He would expect the priest to frown; he would expect her to chide him, or call for his mother, to stand him up in front of the Sun Tree and call for all to witness his blasphemy, to witness his shame. Instead, she smiles, and it makes her face beautiful.

“I didn’t ask you to believe in this, Master de Rolo. I asked you to believe in _ something_.” She reaches out to brush a strand of hair behind his ear; she smells like scented oil and cinnamon, like dark, holy places. “And I will ask you to think on this, Percival, before I let you go: if you don’t believe in anything, what will believe in you?” 

She does let him go, then, after Percy (head bowed, sneer barely concealed), promises that he will meditate long and hard on her questions. He runs out of the chapel with his eyes to the sky and to his siblings; if the priest watches him, he doesn’t turn back to see. The question is forgotten by evening. 

Pain stretches out across all of eternity before reaching its logical endpoint at the other side of the room: a slash of red. Her curling lips.

His own are bloody. His mouth and his body, too, from places he hadn’t known could bleed. He’s learned so much from Anna that it’s hard to imagine a Percival who _ hadn’t _ \- hadn’t known what a scream sounds like when coaxed from a throat long gone mute; a Percival who hadn’t known the knife. It has been a day, a year, an hour he’s been down here with Dr. Ripley. Percy’s already broken so many times before, and he knows, too, that he’ll break again. 

Anna isn’t one for aesthetics. It’s the fact of the suffering that interests her, much more than the bruise patterns it leaves behind. She’s different from the Briarwoods in this if nothing else. (Silas has recently become enamored with tracking Percival’s decay over time: “Look dear, he’ll coo, “look how the skin’s beginning to molt-” 

At least he stops himself at looking. The Lady Briarwood likes to touch.) 

Anna doesn’t care one bit for the flesh. She regards him with a scientific - if not entirely apathetic - eye, and it’s almost a relief after a visit from Silas and Delilah. The pain Anna offers is cruel, but it’s the same cruelty she would offer a dog, or a dissected corpse; under her indifferent hands Percy can begin the process of becoming a body. 

And that’s the thing, the horrible, stomach-churning things, that in these moments he’s _ grateful _to her, to her disinterested gaze, to her workman’s touch. 

It’s the sort of thought he should bury deep in his heart, salt the ground and raze the earth so that the roots can’t even dream of sunlight. Instead, he tells Anna, because there is nothing else he hasn’t already. 

She looks at him without expression, and then she turns away. 

He tried for defiance, at first. _ Please believe me_, he’s rehearsed the speech to his family so often it’s nearly become a prayer: _ that I tried. _

“Surely,” he had said, “as a fellow scientist,” how highly he had regarded himself, he could weep, “surely you can see reason, surely you will _ stop_.” 

The _ stop _ had been delivered in a tone that asserted itself, in all its rights and glory, as the will of a scion of Whitestone, of the de Rolos, of Tal'Dorei _ herself_. It was a tone Percy used quite often - to get an unruly servant to jump at his command, or to get Vesper to stop laughing at him for something or another. It was a tone to be obeyed. 

Anna laughed, too. Softer than Vesper. Almost gentle. Almost kind. 

Here is how Anna responded: with fire, with cold, with bleeding, with dark. In the beginning, the dark was the worst; by the end, he will come to regard it as something of a friend. With the absence of light comes the absence of sight; with the absence of sight he is not forced to look down at himself, strapped to the Table or huddled beneath it, and to remember that he has a body, and to remember what has been done to it. 

There is no sun down here, so Percy sets his internal clock to Dr. Ripley. When Anna is gone, he sleeps (or faints, at this point it’s a matter of semantics); when she’s here he… doesn’t. He prefers the waking. When Anna leaves there is silence; when there’s silence, there’s memory waiting to fill it. Percy wakes to his sister’s screams, to his captor’s laughter, to the inexplicable smell of smoke. He prefers the pain he knows is real to its spectral twin. 

Life continues, presumably. (A year ago, he surely would have scoffed at the idea that the world could survive without the de Rolos; now, it grows difficult to remember that he once held ownership of his own life, let alone a _ name _.) News of the world trickles down, down, down into the underground, slowly but surely, tucked between the tight, pursed lips of those surviving servants. They whisper to each other when they think Anna isn’t listening - that the fallen de Rolo whelp might also be straining for any scrap of information never crosses their minds. 

(They try not to look at him, and those that do tend towards contempt. Here is the product of Whitestone, he hears them think, the sum total of two centuries breeding and scheming and fucking and fighting - a man, more recently a boy, laid bare on Anna Ripley’s table, sobbing snot-nosed for a mother who at least had the decency to die. _ He _never cared for them, never fought or bled for them; he’s the excess child of an excess family, and if that family is dead well, so are theirs. They don’t have the luxury of crying.

No wonder they forget him.) 

This is what he hears: _ they tore apart the temple, they desecrated the Sun Tree, they cut down our families and raised them up unholy. _

Rumors spread like fever. Percy watches the virus spread with a disinterested horror. Servants arm themselves with icons to Pelor, until one day they don’t. Visits from the Briarwood become more frequent, more heated, until one day they stop. Anna becomes more rigid and silent, until one day she isn’t. 

There is something stirring beneath Castle Whitestone, but Percy long ago lost the capacity to care about anything beyond the tip of Anna Ripley’s knife. 

Some decades ago, a particularly zealous de Rolo commissioned what was to be the centerpiece of Whitestone Chapel. The towering monument to some nameless Peloran martyr is a masterwork in despair, so much so that as you gaze upon it you half expect to hear a sob, pitiful and holy, echoing through the domed room. 

The craftman’s talent for stonework was only matched by her skill in bootlicking; it’s said the statue provides a better picture of its commissioner than the deathmask laid above her tomb. And it proves, too, that the de Rolo blood runs strong in Whitestone. Its eyes are blank, and its hair is white, but otherwise - it is whispered - it could be mistaken at first glance for the young master Percival. 

They keep - kept the statue in the church, in a shadowy corner most often visited by mice and cobwebs. “It makes people feel frightened,” his mother said. “It makes people feel _ guilty _,” had been his father’s retort.

When Percival closes his eyes, he sees the statue’s lidless eyes. Its bone-white hair. Its gaping mouth, waiting for a scream that will never, never come. 

Silas and Delilah are gone for longer and longer stretches. In the beginning they graced Dr. Ripley’s lab once a - day? Once a something - peering over Anna’s shoulder, asking the kind of pointed question which made the doctor’s shoulders stiffen and her mouth go hard. Her subjects were goblinoids, small animals, and Percival; her research was strictly confined to pain, and the efficient extraction thereof. 

Now, Anna has been left unsupervised. Now, her research… expands. 

She begins to bring more people down from above. Servants he’d known, or hadn’t known; people from the town whose voices spark something like memory in Percival’s mind. These people are small and soft and expandable; these people Anna can bend and break in new and exciting ways, just for the simple excitement of doing something _ new_. Anna begins to laugh, loud and freely, and mad. Percy thinks that he almost prefers this Ripley, because this one smiles, and it doesn’t look like when his mother did but he can pretend. 

Something is breaking, down here in the darkness. 

She doesn’t bother locking up Percy anymore. In the beginning he was chained to the Table; the iron-wrought shackles around his wrist and ankles left tattoos that are only just beginning to fade. (This means he’s been unchained long enough for them _ to _ fade, and still he remains; he would hate himself had he energy to feel.) He creeps along the walls like a specter, skittering through the shadows and trying not to make a sound, not to have a body.

But even when Anna notices him, crouched behind a table full of strange, bubbling chemicals, or shivering underneath a pile of discarded rags, she doesn’t seem to see him. Or rather, she sees the shape of him, but nothing else; she will run a hand through his hair, or pinch the soft skin of his neck, and she smiles at the whining but it’s an absent smile, a bored smile. Her attention is somewhere else. Somewhere far below. 

The priest comes near the end, when the steady stream of new and exciting guests has slowed to a trickle and Anna must turn her gaze upwards, towards people Percival was certain (one of the few things he thought he could pin certainty on, down here) had been safe. 

The years/days/hours have not been kind to Pelor’s woman. Rich, chestnut hair has begun to clump and fall out; the laugh-lines have faded in favor of dull gray bags beneath her eyes. She doesn’t last long. Few do, and Percy knew better than to have any hope. It’s less than a day before she’s opening up her secrets and her ribs and her heart for Dr. Ripley, offering her- the secret spots where the devoted still worship; the hidden passages beneath the Sun Tree, where she would meet Johanna and take her whispered confessions, sins, doubts, dreams; the doubts that she harbored, still harbors, the blasphemy that lies dark in her heart eating away at a soul she doubts Pelor will ever, could ever want. 

Dr. Ripley takes it all and files it away with a cool smile. She smooths the broken woman’s hair, wipes the sweat from her brow and dabs away her blood. Percy watches with shadowed eyes, the movement of her hand against the priest-woman’s cheek, a mother soothing a child, a goddess soothing her pilgrim. A tight, thick jealousy wants to choke his throat. 

It’s late at night that the priest recognizes him; she’s been left in her cell, left to rot, or die, or wait for Anna to grow bored again. Percy creeps up to the cell bars. He’s so thin he could almost slip between them, could almost become a shadow. He watches her, watches her lips move in a silent litany he half-remembers: _ light our path towards salvation_. 

He makes a noise in his throat, low, strange. The priest’s eyes crack open. And then, horribly, beautifully, she smiles. 

“Percival,” she says. She reaches a bony hand towards him. Two of the fingers are broken; one is missing, not recently. She used to wear beautiful rings, he knows, and her voice was beautiful, too. Her voice is a dried-up riverbed, now, and she watches him like he’s a rain-heavy cloud. 

“Percival, please.” She gestures with a limp, broken hand towards his unchained feet. “Please, she- the lady isn’t watching. Please, you can save us.” 

Anna is always watching, even when he’s gone. He reaches out to touch the priest woman’s hand. It feels strange to touch another human, and he grabs on a bit too tight. She’s too gone to even wince.

“I,” he says. And then he stops. Looks at the ground. Looks at anywhere but her. 

She sighs, but it’s not for him. When she touches his head it’s to smooth a lock of hair behind his head, a familiar, gentle motion that makes him want to flinch away. The feeling of being forgiven, of being _ understood _, burns at his skin.

“If not that, then,” she whispers, “then maybe you will pray with me.” 

He feels Anna’s eyes on him, a heavy, velvet presence. He turns his head to look at her. She watches him with a curious smile, and Percy cannot look away.

_ My lord Dawnfather_, he hears himself whisper. 

“Anna,” he says instead. 

He tastes smoke in his mouth. 

The priest doesn’t last the night. 

Drip, drip, drip. The beat, water, blood, his fading pulse, isn’t even steady enough to carry him into oblivion. He hasn’t slept in… a time, and there’s a blue haze clouding his eyes, a brittle sharp edge to the world he can’t remember ever having been there before. He tried to ask if he’s dying, but it hurts too much to talk. And besides, he already knows the answer. 

This latest stretch of consciousness has been a quiet one. Percy can’t remember if that means _ good _ or if that means _ bad:_ the distinction has long since blurred. She’s facing her workbench, fiddling with - something. She’s been inventing more and more, lately; in the absence of instructions her ingenuity, her cruelty, seems to have evolved. She’s coming into her own, Dr. Ripley, and Percy, it seems, has been chosen to bear witness. 

She picks the instrument up, holds it to the light. His glasses were long taken and broken, and so his mind rushes to fill in the gaps. It’s gratifying to know that he still has some capacity for terror, except it isn’t, not really. 

She turns. Percy flinches. She laughs, not lightly, the thought is antithetical here, but with a kind of amusement that at one point in his life he wouldn’t have understood. 

Something in her hand. Silver, or white - and even without full sight Percy can see its wicked tip. 

“Do you know what this is, Percival?”

She’s always had a lovely voice. It reminds him of - that woman, who was she? She would always give him something when she saw him, a sweet, or five minutes to help groom Father’s new Zemnian gelding, it had towered over him like a giant and she’d hoisted him on its back, and laughed and called him a little prince- That’s right, she worked at the stables. She had a long, handsome face, and she’s dead now, he saw her head left to rot in a pile of refuse and he’ll probably join her, soon, Anna has been getting impatient, Anna has been getting bored, he’s tried to be good but it’s not _ enough- _

Pain. Pain like he’s never felt before (he’s thought that so many times recently but this will be the one that sticks). It took her just a second to slash the blade across his chest, but the agony grows and grows and grows. He’s on fire - he’s freezing - he’s dying. 

Percy tries to crumple in on himself with some animal instinct to protect himself, his heart, but the manacles hold him back. Instead he throws his head back to thrash like an entirely different kind of beast.

Through the haze, somewhere far, far away, Anna laughs once more. “This is something new, Percival.” She lays the flat side of the knife against his stomach, right above the guts. Every time he breathes, it bites his skin. But there’s no blood, nothing to prove the vast, hollow pain corkscrewing down and deep. It’s _ inside _ him, this wound, a squirming, burrowing creature setting everything it touches alight. There’s no blood loss, no external wounds, no way to die but from the pain, and that’s a long way away. “And you’ve been so good to me that I thought you’d like to be the first to try it out.” 

The scream’s gone out of him; the noise he makes is more like a sob, or a mewl, and he can _ feel _ Anna’s pleasure. Somehow, it is this which hurts the most. 

He tried to be good. He tried to be amusing. He tried to survive.

But Anna is done with him, now, and so Percy has failed. And so Percy will die. 

“Please,” Percy whispers. It’s to Anna, but it’s also- It’s also to the white stone floor, soaked almost to staining with his blood; it’s to the bodies crumpled in the corner, who once had names and lives and breath, too, he’s almost certain. It’s to the gods he’s never, not once believed in - and it’s to Anna Ripley, as she holds the knife to his gasping throat and brings her lips to his ear. 

“Beg,” she whispers. And Percy does. To Anna; to the gods; to whatever lies waiting in the space between. 

It’s become impossible to tell what is and isn’t a dream, but this must be: because there isn’t any pain, and because it doesn’t hurt to breathe, and because the deep-red pool shows him a face still proud and unyielding. It doesn’t make him want to weep, because he doesn’t have the tears, but it does make his chest ache, and that’s something. 

“What do you believe, Percival?” 

The question comes from the darkness, and Percival stares into the darkness, and there is nothing in the darkness, except, again: “What do you believe, Percival de Rolo?” 

She’s standing across from him, the woman clothed in black. But ‘clothed’ is such an insignificant word - her gown is dark, but so is her hair, and her fingertips, and her eyes, and the way she peers not at him but _ into _ him, so that Percival feels as though everything he is and everything he will be is laid bare for the perusal and dismissal of this strange woman. Percival shivers. His reflection doesn’t move.

“I’m sorry if I offended, my lady-“ he tries, remembering in some haze the litany of prayers, of lies, he offered up to Anna’s knife - because there is nothing else for this woman to be but a goddess. She wears divinity like Vesper wears - well, nothing, yet, but he thinks that Vesper may someday at least aspire towards this woman’s divine, dismissive pride. 

Now she never will, he thinks. And it’s the first time he’s thought of his sister in days-weeks-hours, here, in the dream realm of a dark goddess, as far away as can be from whatever sunny field in which Vesper has surely found her eternal rest. He would laugh, but he doesn’t.

“I believe Ves- in my family,” he says, and is surprised at the sound. He hadn’t meant to speak.

“Your family?” The pool shifts - from Cassandra, laughing, smiling, screaming - to Whitney and Oliver, their legs, oh gods, their legs broken, their eyes blank - to a de Rolo banner, torn near in two, trampled deep into a puddle of muck. “A name you wield like a paper shield, a legacy you hide from behind books and clockwork? No, Percival,” the goddess says. “What do you believe in?” 

Percy flushes, but when he opens his mouth to retort an entirely different sound emerges: “I believe in Whitestone.” 

The woman doesn’t laugh, but the shadows shift a little, and her mouth does, too. “You believe in rocks.” 

“I believe in an_ idea _.” 

“An idea you’ll sell for a moment’s respite.” The water shifts to show a moving image, a battered and bruised Percival strapped to Dr. Ripley’s table; his eyes are like a frenzied calf’s as Anna lifts the knife. There’s no sound, but still his screams echoes through the dark cavern,_ “Dr. Ripley, please, Anna, please, I’ll be good, I’ll be _good-”

When Percy hangs his head, the reflection does, too. It takes him a moment to identify the feeling. He’s surprised to realize he can still know shame. 

Cool fingertips grasp his chin, and there’s a surprising gentleness in the motion. The woman must stand a few inches shorter, but still she towers over him. No warmth radiates from her body, no light from her eyes. In her face he sees divinity. In her face, he can’t see Anna. 

“Percival,” the woman says, “what do you believe in?” 

Percival looks this woman-goddess in the eye. He sees his answer reflected in her gaze. 

“Nothing,” Percy whispers, and the woman in black impossibly, breathtakingly, smiles. 

“Keep that close to your heart, young Lord de Rolo. This is my blessing for you: as long as you believe in nothing…” She leans in and presses ice-cold lips to his ear. “Nothing will believe in you.” 

Percy closes his eyes. The sound of wings carries him into black, or maybe smoke. 

And then comes Cassandra, or maybe her ghost. And then comes the tunnel, and more darkness, and then light, at the end; he thinks about Pelor, he thinks about the priest, he thinks about Elysium; and he can’t tell, as they stumble out into muck and refuse, whether the thing he feels in the pit of his stomach is revulsion or relief. And then comes a river, and then comes the trees, and then comes safety, and then comes _ salvation- _

At the edge of the forest Percival turns back. He looks towards Whitestone, towards her towering, still-shining walls. He looks towards Anna. He thinks, for a moment, about stepping forward; about running back towards her, about throwing himself at her feet, and begging for ablution. He thinks about the dark curve of her smile. He thinks about her knife. He thinks about the relief that pain will bring, and also about oblivion. 

In the forest, a raven caws. In the forest, Cassandra waits. 

Percy turns around. He walks forward, away from the darkness, into the night. 

**Author's Note:**

> this is near incoherent but it's been sitting in my drafts for a year and i just wanted it gone 
> 
> come bully me into writing critrole stories that aren't about torture on twitter @espeon


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